Present day providers of voice telephony service, such as AT&T, handle both domestic, as well as international calls. In most, but not all instances, a party to a telephone call uses the language of the country of origin of the call when speaking with another party, especially when both parties reside in the same country. Thus, for example, the parties to a call within the United States generally speak in English. In some instances, the national language of the country of origin of the call may not necessarily be the native language of one or more parties to that call. Immigrants to the United States from non-English speaking countries, even when they become proficient in English, often speak with an accent. While this is neither bad nor uncommon, a party to a call may encounter difficulties in attempting to understand a non-native language speaker, especially if that party speaks with a heavy accent.
A non-native language party to a call could avoid the difficulty of comprehension by choosing to speak his or her native language and employ a translation service, such as AT&T Language Line, to translate the speech into a language comprehensible by the other party or parties to the call. Such language translation services, which effective, are nonetheless costly to use on a regular basis. Moreover, for most non-native language speakers, communicating with others in the national language of the country of origin of the call becomes a matter of pride and perception by others on the call.
Thus, there is a need for a technique for normalizing the speech of one or more parties to a telephone call to improve intelligibility.